Concealed Carry

Standing under the fluorescent lights of his damp classroom, a mud-caked hornets’ nest suspended from the ceiling near his shoulder, Lewis had us watch a video he likes to show his students. On the television screen before us, we saw a federal Drug Enforcement Agency officer shooting himself in the thigh as he gave a presentation about gun safety to a group of children and parents in Florida. My classmates seemed duly impressed. But the message that Lewis wanted to impart—“treat every gun as if it was loaded”— might also have been made by mentioning other recent examples of people harmed by guns who ostensibly should have known better, including the Nevada concealed-carry permit holder who shot himself in the buttocks at a movie theater in August of last year, the Texas police officer who shot himself in the foot this past March and the Detroit woman who was shot and killed in July 2012, when she hugged an off-duty police officer whose gun went off.

Lewis, adhering with a poker face to the NRA-taught notion that it’s not guns that are dangerous but poorly trained gun owners, asked how many people in our class had left a loaded gun at home. Half the room raised their hands. As I looked around, I wondered—not for the first time—what these Marylanders intended to do with their Utah permits. When I asked them, they each told me they were concerned with self-defense. I mentioned to them that I was a freelance writer, and most of those I interviewed asked that I use only a first name.

One man in class, Brian, who manages construction projects in Maryland, Virginia and other nearby states, told me his decision to carry a gun was prompted by fears for his life. “I had a knife pulled on me just the other day,” he told me. “We do business in a lot of lousy neighborhoods, and I want to know that I can defend myself when someone’s trying to kill me.”

Mark, a geologist from Baltimore, said he frequently worked in “remote areas” in the West, adding, “I worry about some of the people I run into.” Robert, 27, the only African-American in our class, said he’s a trucker and, like many in his business, carries a gun for self-defense. The Utah license, he says, will make it legal for him to carry that gun, at least in some of the states he drives through.

Roxanne Thompson, 59, a spirited former minister and self-described “tomboy” with closely cropped silver hair, said she started thinking about carrying a concealed weapon when she learned that the man who had raped and sodomized her daughter was getting out of prison. Thompson said she wants to be able “to protect my grandkids, my husband and my dogs.” She insisted that her decision to carry a concealed weapon, which she says she’ll hide in her bra, is “not about fear,” but simply that “the world is not getting any safer.”

If Lewis’s course succeeds in providing some measure of security for people like Thompson, it won’t be because it’s taught her how to use her gun. The shooting range where Lewis convenes his class sits in a lovely forest clearing that provides charming environs for target practice—but the setting might as well be purely for atmosphere, since actually shooting a gun is not required for the Utah permit.

As in many other states, Utah’s concealed-carry law includes nothing more than a vague requirement that licensees demonstrate “familiarity with the type of firearm to be concealed.” Only 18 states require any live fire training. As for me and my classmates, we weren’t given so much as a written test. Lewis suggested several times that his students regularly practice their marksmanship and take additional classes. But when I asked him if he saw any problem with states issuing concealed carry licenses to people who might have no idea how to fire a gun safely, he said he did not.

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OPTICS: The Sandy Hook Backlash: How the pro-gun community rallied after Newtown—and won. (Click to view slide show.)

“Personally I feel the right to carry a gun every day is your right, and you shouldn’t have to take a class at all, to be honest about it,” he said. He then explained that the right to carry a concealed weapon was no different, in his view, than the right to choose where you go to church. “But isn’t some sort of live-fire training essential to be a responsible gun owner?” I asked. “Well, that’s why I recommend additional training,” Lewis allowed. “A responsible gun owner learns how to use his firearm, but I don’t think that should be mandated by the state.”

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Utah's application for a concealed firearm permit. (Click to enlarge.)

At the conclusion of Lewis’s presentation, I introduced myself to John, a young heavyset man who told me he was taking the class because, he claimed, his home was robbed by a gang member who had been recently released from prison and who now lived just down the street in his Baltimore neighborhood. John said he wanted the Utah permit because the state of Maryland refused to issue him a license, although he didn’t say why. Of course, under federal law, John is allowed to own as many firearms as he wants, and he’s allowed to use them to defend himself in his home—he just can’t take them into the street, according to Maryland law.

The fact that the Utah license is, at least legally, of no use to him didn’t seem to matter. He wanted one anyway. And if Lewis is able to sell the illusion of safety or the cloak of legal approval, he’s happy to oblige. Just like the NRA, he has an obvious stake in convincing people that there’s a simple fix to the jumble of conflicting state laws. Never mind that the only thing the proliferation of concealed carry permits really guarantees is that there will be more guns sold and more people carrying them.

More people like John, who left the Izaak Walton League clubhouse with an official-looking “Certificate of Completion” for the course, signed and dated by Perrin A. Lewis.

Alan Berlow is author of Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic and Harper’s, among other publications. He is a former New Jersey state rifle champion.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story inaccurately reported that Virginia law exempts military veterans from background checks for the purposes of obtaining a concealed carry permit.